The locus of the present invention is described in claim 1 of the cross-referenced patent application Ser. No. 09/325,358, granted as U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,564. It is a series of computer-generated lists of text data objects on data tables that are manually or automatically imaged at a selected speed for human discovery of meaningful interrelations of parameter values and/or text data object names. The present invention is a means by which the computer user viewing a series of such permutations chooses to retain in sight a plurality of columns of parametric values but reduces the number of possible permutations by signaling the computer to exclude selected columns from sorting.
The data table addressed by the present invention is one component of the several required for the mind-centric analytic methodology described in cross-referenced U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,139. That methodology, named contextual data modeling (CDM) by the present inventor, is explained in detail in cross-referenced U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,564. It is a systemized form of computer-aided morphological analysis that deals with parametric objects in an orderly way in which no interrelations of their parameter values and/or identifiers on a data table are ignored by the user, during the visual examination of imaged data that leads to the reasoned conclusions, a priori as being unimportant. Said text data objects are any type of physical bodies, events, ideas, or any other entities that have unique identifying names or numbers, plus parameters such as weight, material, location, date, age, importance, etcetera. It will be apparent that such “evidence items” exist in many fields of human endeavor that involve analysis, investigation, research, investigation, and supervision and that many interrelations of parametric values and/or names are possible. The present applicant believes a review of CDM herein, and comparison with operation of spreadsheet programs, provides conceptual and functional background important for assessment of the merit of the present invention as an improved component of CDM.
Existing electronic spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft EXCEL™, also generate tabular displays of text and numeric data. The data elements from which such tabular displays are generated by such spreadsheet programs and by embodiments of cross referenced U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,564 consist of unitary human readable textual and/or numeric expressions, suitable for insertion into intersections of the rows and columns, commonly called cells. Examples of such data elements are “Smith,” “steering assy,” and “64993765.” The user of spreadsheet programs inserts said data elements into appropriate cells and after all desired data are entered, the user can signal the computer to sort the data in one or several columns in order to generate displays that conform with criteria specified by the user. The typical end result is a single or small number of tabular displays that meet pre-conceived needs.
In CDM, the mind of the computer user, not the computer, analyzes a dataset to discover all meaningful interrelations, such as groups, sequences, similarities, etcetera. Neuroscience teaches that what a person sees, hears, and thinks is profoundly shaped by that person's beliefs and expectations. Consequently, the merit of each interrelation is determined by the user in the context of that person's semantic, episodic, and procedural memory (knowledge, experience, and skills) as well as emotion. The user's intuition, imagination, and reasoning then lead to user-controlled iteration of permutations, and modeling/manipulation of the imaged data to synchronize it with the user's reasoning.
The modeling consists of editing text and adding colors to text, fields, rows, or columns and re-examining all or selected revised tables. For example, a user's reasoning can lead to changing a parameter value “76” to “75” to support re-sorting that relocates that data object into a group of others with the value “75” for the same parameter. Further, the user is optionally able to then color the “76” to indicate that it is a temporarily changed number. Modeling continues until the user has identified and evaluated all possible meaningful interrelations.
The number of permutations on a data table is determined by the mathematical factorial expression “n factorial”, or n!, in which n is the product of the numbers 1 through n. Thus a table with three columns has (1×2×3) 6 permutations, four columns have (1×2×3×4) 24 permutations, five columns have 120 permutations, and so forth. It is apparent that it is a difficult task for a person to manually signal the computer 720 times, for example, to generate and study each of the 720 permutations of a data table with 6 parameters, or to so examine all 40,320 permutations of a table with 8 parameters. In addition to being tedious, the user's working memory will retain awareness of few data perceived on all but the most recently examined permutations. In any case, however, the computer user may require, for the integrity of the human analysis, that all displayed columns of parametric values remain in the user's field of vision although not all are sorted during permutation of the columns. The present invention satisfies that need.